


If You Are a Cliffhanger Ending

by Mantha (Eli_Finch)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Cannon-Typical Bastards, M/M, jonmartin is in the background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:48:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23775619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eli_Finch/pseuds/Mantha
Summary: Simple little LonelyEyes study with a dash of JonMartin, circa early-S2 but light spoilers for S4
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 1
Kudos: 64





	If You Are a Cliffhanger Ending

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a lyric from the song "Toes" by Lights

"...sorry this has been so delayed. We've had some recent...renovations, not to mention quite a bit of police activity. I didn't think it the right time for a business meeting..."

  
Peter pulled himself back from his daydreaming and blinked, nodded, as Elias seemed to near the end of his rambling.

"...but...in any case...that's the paperwork all in order, then. So... I guess you'll be leaving."

Elias's tone was somewhere between irritated and smug as he waved an arm lazily toward the door of his office, not looking up from the papers he clutched in the other.  
There was something else in his words, too. Something unsavory. Something, maybe, tender. Some sort of...

Peter stood, putting the thought away. He was good at compartmentalizing - it was an essential duty in his line of work.  
He was good at feigning ignorance and better yet at genuinely cultivating it. From a young age, he knew that looking closely at things only made it dangerously easy to grow attached to them. Toys, pets, humans, desires - all the same.  
Much easier to look the other way, as it were.

But he was never ignorant about who Elias was. Elias was a man driven rarely by cruelty but often enabled by it, a man whose unquenchable desire to watch the suffering of others without intervention was just as much the will of his god as it was his own.  
No, Elias was not a tender man. Not even close. Never had another person been so skilled at being cold and distant while swallowed up in Peter's embrace.

It's what made their long-standing arrangement...tolerable.

So Peter first tried to ignore this lapse, this...something. Sort it as a trick of his senses.  
However, the moment his hand gripped the doorknob, he felt it. Eyes at all points around him turning sharply inward, like revolving doors ever-spinning and trapping him in place.  
He dare not move.

The feeling was like just-scalding bathwater on his skin. If Elias so wished, it could turn up a few degrees to sweltering on a whim.

"Yes, Elias?" Peter said to the door in front of him. Elias's vague, swimming reflection in the narrow glass window lifted both hands in a halting gesture.

"A moment longer. I want you to see something."

Peter could tell by his tone that Elias had his mind in other places. Something that should have caused alarm in Peter...  
...But that tinge to his voice. An indescribable thing that felt wrong. Against all better judgment, Peter was too curious to ignore it. He regarded the man's reflection with a calm smile.

"Feeling lonely today, are we?"

Elias had heard this jest many times and Peter could hear him exhale softly in amusement.

"Indulge me, Mr. Lukas."

Peter turned finally to face him. He wondered: if he made eye contact, what would he see? Would it tell him exactly what that strange sensation had been? A pointless thought that he banished instantly.  
He walked back to Elias's desk and sat down in the guest chair, staring at the wood grain in front of him.  
Elias stood from his own seat and circled around to Peter in that peculiar way of his, like a scavenger circling a heap of carrion.

"Am I in trouble?" asked Peter. "I've been on my best, promise. I didn't even take anyone in the lobby on my way in."

"Ha, ha," punctuated Elias humorlessly, though he was smiling. "How kind. No, you're not in trouble."

As he moved along his side, Elias brushed a knuckle along Peter's scraggly cheek, stopping it just to the side of his mouth.  
Peter stopped himself from responding, a disinterested smile painted on his face. Inside, his heart was beginning to pound.

Elias kept his momentum as he ran his bony fingers through the salt-gray hair behind Peter's ear, combing it aside and tugging his hat off with a flick of the wrist.

Peter did nothing but lift a hand up, palm open, and Elias chuckled and handed him his hat, so he could hold it in his lap with both hands.  
Elias was directly behind him now, feet still pivoting gently along on the tile floor. Like he was dancing, Peter supposed, but with a marble statue for a dance partner. The thought made him laugh aloud.

"Something is funny about this," Elias said, as close to a question as it could be without being one.

"No, my dear," said Peter. "Just thinking of something else."

"Oh, I See," said Elias dryly, and Peter groaned in half-hearted annoyance, a noise which Elias rewarded with a gentle brush of fingers along his shoulders.

Affection with Elias was always like this: like a ritual, or in more mundane cases, like someone cheating an unlucky card out of their hand and up their sleeve for later. Never straightforward. Certainly never boring.  
Sometimes it irritated Peter, but not now. There was that soft - urgency, maybe? - to Elias's movements that fascinated him in this moment.  
He put his hat on the edge of the desk, a gesture of willing participation.

Elias was to his left side now, running both hands over Peter's broad back and down his left arm. Peter could barely feel it through his thick coat, but he could feel Elias's warm breath against his neck. Elias sank into almost a crouch beside his chair and finally took Peter's hand with both of his own, pushing their fingers through each other and seeming to find satisfaction in the way they locked into place one by one.  
Just to test the waters, Peter tried to move away as if to stand up, but Elias held his wrist and brought it, in that dainty and arrogant Victorian way of his, up to his parted lips. His intentions, momentarily, were clear, and Peter seized this rare moment of clairvoyance with both relief and hunger, moving his hand down and gripping the smaller man's collar just tightly enough to guide him backwards out of the way so he could stand from his chair.

Elias ran his fingers sternly down Peter's cheekbone and under his chin, then pressed experimentally into his throat, just to the side of his Adam's apple.

Peter pressed back against him in retaliation, until he had Elias pinned to his desk. One hand fell loosely on Elias's shoulder, keeping him in place, while the other gripped the side of one thigh and then the other, pulling both legs up and aside so Peter's body could rest more easily between them.

Elias made no secret of his excitement, resting his elbows back on his desk and staring up at Peter's eyes openly.  
Peter was looking somewhere between Elias's ear and collar, and eventually when he felt no resistance, he placed his mouth to that spot.  
Elias murmured something to himself and held Peter's shoulders as Peter began to kiss along his neck and collarbone, hands roving along his lean body.

But after a few minutes, Peter realized that Elias wasn't going to take the lead and progress things as usual. The pleasure was evident in his posture, and in the way he indulgently murmured Peter's name from time to time, but Peter still understood that this wasn't exactly what he'd anticipated, and eventually he drew back and managed to look somewhere just below Elias's eyeline.

"What do you want?" Peter asked. A pointless question, usually, with Elias. But he couldn't help it.

"Just a moment longer," said Elias, that bizarre layering to his voice more obvious than ever. "Please."  
Peter kissed him on the lips, more gently now, and Elias ran a thumb along his temple. "Peter," he said one last time.  
It made Peter feel almost domestic, holding each other like this. The thought rose like bile in his throat, and he stood up sharply.

"I'm leaving," said Peter, grabbing his hat off the desk and planting it on his head as he turned to the door.

"Yes, just on time, I suppose," muttered Elias behind him, somehow lifting himself from the desk and re-buttoning his shirt in a dignified way, brushing the creases from his suit. "They're both late, but...any moment now."  
Peter didn't even pause to attempt deciphering what that could mean. He was already halfway out the door.  
Elias followed him shortly, and behind him, Peter heard him stop to loudly greet someone. His blood froze.

"Good morning, Archivist. I didn't expect to see you back so soon. Feeling alright?"

"A-as alright as you could expect," replied a low, tired voice.

The new Archivist.

Ah.

Peter grimaced.

He'd been vaguely aware of Elias finding Gertrude's replacement some year or so prior, and had understood that the new Archivist had been out of office recently due to a workplace injury, as were a few other archival staff. He had considered the absence a blessing when arranging to visit today.

Peter didn't have much love for Archivists. They always looked much too closely at him.

Peter hastened his step down the hall toward the front exit before Elias could rope him into a carousel of awkward pleasantries and goodbyes.  
However, as soon as Peter entered the front lobby, a young man burst in from the street: freckle-spotted and round with huge, frantic brown eyes, the man barreled past Peter and the receptionist desk without so much as a glance at either.  
A swirling cloud of loneliness flooded the lobby in his wake, filling Peter's senses so entirely that he had to place a hand on a nearby chair to steady himself. He struggled to orient himself and couldn't help but follow the newcomer's path back toward where Elias and his Archivist were talking quietly.

"Y-you're back!" The lonely young man exclaimed, "But so soon, too soon!"

And Peter unwittingly saw the object of this stranger's rapt attention: the young Archivist was scrawny and world-worn, with bandages covering most of the fresh pocked wounds along his arms and neck, and intense eyes that met the newcomer's gaze with wariness. Elias had stepped back into the doorway of his office and was watching the interaction with pointed interest.

Peter heard the Archivist snap some half-hearted reprimand under his breath to the lonely man, but when he replied by placing a steadying hand on his back, the Archivist did not draw away, and they walked together out of sight.  
Peter stood frozen for a few minutes, an array of thoughts and understandings bursting in his head. He didn't realize Elias had materialized at his side until he spoke.

"I wonder if that young man captured your interest as much as I anticipated."

In response to the almost-question, Peter simply nodded.  
This was something Peter had been unable to compartmentalize. A feeling of such aching and sublime loneliness that he was astounded the Institute staff around him HADN'T reacted to it. It was tantalizing, in a way that almost frightened him.

"And your Archivist is looking...let's say...quite marked already," said Peter, trying to re-surface.

"That fire in your eyes..." rumbled Elias. "Hmm. you might not See it the way I do, but you do feel it. Like..."

"Like walking down a long staircase," supplied Peter distractedly.

"It's a path laid out for both of us," said Elias, that strange tone in his voice again. "They may not know where it ends, but you...do, I imagine." Always just barely refraining from posing it as a question. One of the few mercies Elias was capable of. Had making him stay long enough to see this been a mercy, as well? Or was this fast-dawning revelation an ill-disguised cruelty, like so many other things Elias had given him?

"Yes," said Peter, the sound of waves rolling between his ears.

Yes, the scrutinizing, ravenous gaze of this young Archivist pointed only in one inevitable direction: down. Down long winding steps to a scar in the earth, to a place of such knowing and seeing that Peter's heart raced just to think of it. This path led to an ultimatum, a bargain, a bet. A bet Elias was unwilling or unable to lose, and so had already chosen Peter as its loser. The lonely young man that Elias had tricked up his sleeve was hardly a necessary bait. Peter had already taken his first steps, long before this.

Elias was still close behind him, and through the malaise of his own thoughts, Peter imagined he could even feel fingers resting softly on the small of his back for a moment before Elias pushed him forward ever so slightly.

"I'll see you soon, Mr. Lukas. Always a pleasure," he said in his usual snide voice before Peter was shoving his way out the front door.

.

Peter realized it once he was several blocks away, as if a fog had cleared.  
That tender something he had felt in Elias in his office had been regret.

Regret.  
Inevitability.

It was something he genuinely hadn't thought the man was capable of anymore.  
It wasn't a good sign.  
No, not at all.

But that hardly mattered.  
Peter kept walking. As he'd said, the path lay before them.


End file.
